A little-noticed analysis by the CBO last week showed that rather than controlling costs in the near- and long-term, ObamaCare does nothing to change the upward pressure on medical costs. In fact, as Keith Hennessey argues in a guest column at Business Insider, the bill in combination with the anticipated “doc fix”, it will substantially worsen the situation. CBO chief Douglas Elmendorf obliterates the Obama administration’s argument that the health-care cost issue was at the heart of the deficit crisi... (more)

For a guy from Salon, Jake Tapper has struck me as someone who has been very conscientious as the White House correspondent for ABC News. He usually is trying to be a watchdog, even when his colleagues are content to be lapdogs. That does not make the story coming from his Twitter feed tonight any less odd. That story starts here: (more)

Nancy Pelosi said we would have to pass the bill to find out what was in it, and, unshockingly, easter eggs are still showing up. Not the cool kind which gives you a secret level or a historical slugger, but the kind that takes away all your weapons or wipes out all your game stats. An all-but-overlooked provision of the health reform law is threatening to swamp U.S. businesses with a flood of new tax paperwork. Section 9006 of the health care bill — just a few lines buried in the 2,409-page documen... (more)

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif) got his 'panties in a wad' because several large companies re-stated their bottom lines and announced Obamacare would cost them hundreds of millions of dollars this year. Waxman announced he was calling these companies CEO's on the carpet to explain why they did this. He is now backpedaling and canceling his planned subcommittee hearing. (more)

Accounting basics: when a company experiences what accountants call "a material adverse impact" on its expected future earnings, and those changes affect an item that is already on the balance sheet, the company is required to record the negative impact--"to take the charge against earnings"--as soon as it knows that the change is reasonably likely to occur. (more)

When states tried to fix their individual health insurance markets—the marketplace for those who don't get insurance through their employers—the initial idea was to simply prohibit insurers from discriminating against individuals with preexisting conditions. But that caused what insurers called a "death spiral"—ever higher premiums as relatively healthy people decided to wait until they were sick to buy insurance, leaving smaller and smaller pools of more and more expensive individuals. (more)

The realities, as former CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin pointed out in The New York Times, are different. The real cost is disguised by the fact that the bill includes 10 years of revenue but only six years of spending. It includes $70 billion in premiums for long-term care that will have to be paid out later. It excludes $114 billion in discretionary spending needed to run the program. It includes nearly half a trillion dollars in unrealistic Medicare savings. Holtz-Eakins's bottom line: The bill w... (more)

Democrats dragged themselves over the health-care finish line in part by repeating that voters would like the plan once it passed. Let’s see what they think when they learn their insurance costs will jump right away. Even before President Obama signed the bill on Tuesday, Caterpillar said it would cost the company at least $100 million more in the first year alone. Medical device maker Medtronic warned that new taxes on its products could force it to lay off a thousand workers. Now Verizon joins the r... (more)

Now that the House “will have to act again, some liberals want Democrats to give the public option one last chance by adding it to the reconciliation bill,” POLITICO reports. But it won’t happen. Democrats are insistent that they’ll keep the bill as clean as possible so the House can give the measure swift approval – and that the party can be done with the health care debate once and for all. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a leading proponent of a public option, shook his head when asked whether h... (more)

Like Orin, were I forced to make a prediction, I would predict that the individual mandate will survive judicial review. Federal courts have been quite reluctant to strike down federal statutes on enumerated powers grounds for quite some time, and the individual mandate is a larger and more consequential piece of legislation than those invalidated by the Rehnquist Court. But while I think judicial rejection of the mandate is unlikely, I hardly think the chances are as remote as Orin suggests. (more)